Finally. The New York Times is on the case.

(About a decade too late. But we’ll take an awakening whenever it comes and wherever, as we’ve said before).

At The Times, criticism of Tim Geithner’s insider status:

“A revolving door has long connected Wall Street and the New York Fed. Mr. Geithner’s predecessors, E. Gerald Corrigan and William J. McDonough, wound up as investment-bank executives. The current president, William C. Dudley, came from Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Geithner followed a different route. An expert in international finance, he served under both Clinton-era Treasury secretaries, Mr. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers. He impressed them with his handling of foreign financial crises in the late 1990s before landing a top job at the International Monetary Fund.

When the New York Fed was looking for a new president, both former secretaries were advisers to the bank’s search committee and supported Mr. Geithner’s candidacy. Mr. Rubin’s seal of approval carried particular weight because he was by then a senior official at Citigroup.”

More at “Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club,” Joe Becker and Gretchen Morgenson.

My Comment:

Here at The Mind-Body Politic, your diligent commentator makes it a point to cite people, even  if they don’t reciprocate, so we will note appreciatively that Ms. Morgenson did the leg work that outed Goldman Sachs for its presence at the AIG bail-out  (September 30, 2008). She deserves every credit for it.**

But that said, it still remains true that mainstream journalists today are moved less by the need to keep the public informed at the critical time than to bolster their reputations. That is really too bad and it’s why, increasingly, so many people disdain the press. Imagine doctors who watched the patient bleed and didn’t share information about his condition so they could “break” the case for themselves? What sort of professional ethic would that be?

Blogging and writing down intuitions as they occur is the only way of putting valuable information out into the public realm as fast as possible, so as many people can push back from as many angles as possible. That’s the only way to keep up the pressure on public officials.  I could not ethically hold back on my insights, just to avoid having other people take them without acknowledgment. You’d think better positioned journalists would act with equal public spirit, especially as they – unlike bloggers – are paid rather well to do so.

Writing critically about Tim Geithner in 2009, after the milk’s been spilled, and when it’s public knowledge is one thing. Much better for the Times to have written about Geithner a few years ago, when it counted.

This is precisely why the reputation  of the mainstream media among people who follow such things is a little below that of a loan officer at Fannie Mae.

Update:

Apparently, this piece provoked reaction elsewhere in the blogosphere, with Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism claiming that the piece is too kind to Geithner and Paul Kedrosky finding no smoking gun in all of it. Over at Portfolio.com, Ryan Avent sees it as evidence of  Geithner being much less of an establishment figure, much less timid, than people think.

My own sense is that Geithner is more of a scape-goat, a convenient prop to beat up on. It’s the figures behind him, Rubin, Summers, Volker, (and a few others whom I’ll post on later), who are the important players.

As a further aside:

Note this sidebar from The Times (September 28, 2008):

The Reckoning: A Spreading Virus: Articles in the series are exploring the causes of the financial crisis

In the last two years, NRR , The New York Times , and a few other places, have repeatedly used the word “reckoning” for the financial crisis, as well as a a few other terms. They sound strangely reminiscent of my co-author’s very popular newsletter, The Daily Reckoning – well known to DC and NY financial circles.  I’ve seen arguments from said missive (as well as from “Mobs”) lifted wholesale….

No one owns words or phrases or ideas. Or leads. There is no monopoly on them. And all writers are only too happy to have people read them, no matter what.

But political journalism is not simply any journalism. It plays a vital part in the creation and preservation of public memory. And that memory, that record, is essential to monitoring the state – which is the role of the fourth estate.  Journalistic ethics, which cannot be enforced in the courts alone, demands a degree of personal integrity to function as it should in creating and preserving that record.

With notable exceptions, this integrity is not much in supply any longer.

So, while stoning the banking cartel for its sins, let’s keep a few chunky pebbles for the media cartel.

Footnote:

**[I wrote a piece on AIG and Goldman Sachs the week before Morgenson’s piece. My piece was widely disseminated in the blogosphere (and to members of Congress, I learn from readers) and since Morgenson had never written critically about Goldman’s insider ties with AIG before, I have more than a suspicion she took the lead from that piece —  “Lipstick On An AIG” (Counterpunch, September 18-19, 2008)].

PS. I wrote both Morgenson and Jim Pinkerton (who mentioned Morgenson’s story on TV the following weekend), requesting correct attribution. There was no reply.

To the reader who writes to me that such imitation is a form of flattery, I wish….

It has nothing to do with flattery. It’s an attempt to co-opt language. It’s a way of muddying the waters. It’s revisionism. And its goal is to steer your mind the way that opinion-makers (who only voice choices within a carefully vetted spectrum) would have it go. Don’t be misled by the apparent opposition between the left and the corporate class. Communists and capitalists have always colluded when necessary. Certain kinds of capitalists (corporatists) love the state and they love communism — for you.

They know they’re always going to get the perks and privileges of the ruling class, while equality for everyone else makes for a pliable, governable body politic…